How to: run a hyperlocal website with Wordpress

Wordpress is designed to be user-friendly, with the homepage boasting of a 'five-minute installation'

The core of any hyperlocal website is its content management
system, or CMS. With many hyperlocals looking for the cheapest
methods of getting off the ground, PHP-based blogging software
Wordpress has seen an explosion in popularity over recent
years.

Wordpress is an open-source content management system. Users can
either sign up for a free blog on Wordpress.com or they can download
the core software from Wordpress.org and install it to
their own web server.

I decided on
Wordpress.com because of its wealth of features, ease of use and
ease of sharingPaul Deach

Paul Deach, director
of content at the Surrey Heath Residents
Blog, says: "I decided on Wordpress.com because of its wealth
of features, ease of use and ease of sharing with other Wordpress
blogs and other social media platforms such as Facebook and
Twitter."

Wordpress is designed to be user-friendly from the start, with the
Wordpress.org homepage boasting about its "famous five-minute
installation." Citing the fact that "I could see it would do what I
wanted it to do," Phyllis Stephen of the Edinburgh Reporter
says: "I did try Mac based software first of all but it was very
clunky and did not do all the things that WP does – such as
allowing others to post remotely."

While most hyperlocal websites have their own dedicated domain
names, hosting a site through Wordpress.com does allow domain
mapping, where your site has its own unique domain name but the
hosting is still handled by the free Wordpress.com service.

When it comes to hosting packages, it is important that your
provider supports Wordpress. Jon Bounds of Birmingham: It's Not
Shit recommends 1&1
Hosting, who he says he "never had any great problems with." As
editor of The West Londoner I recommend Krystal UK Web Hosting, who I find to
be reliable and who have a good tech support site for the usual
questions first-time website owners always have.

Moving from a Wordpress.com hosted domain to one of your own can be
a stressful task but is easily completed with some careful
backing-up of files. Wordpress has a thriving community of
third-party developers who create plugins which automate that
process. There is also the built-in Export function, which allows
you to take a snapshot of your site’s entire content, including
custom pages, categories and tags.

Once you’ve installed Wordpress and found a suitable theme to
customise its look and feel (Paul Deach says "I decided to use the
default theme as it works so well," adding "it is not the theme
that drives and retains traffic to the site, it is regular relevant
content that does that") you then need to concentrate on the site’s
focus. This, in turn, will determine whether your content is
curated (i.e. gathered from elsewhere, perhaps publishing an
excerpt with a link to the source), or whether it is original to
your site.

On the topic of curated content, Phyllis Stephen says: "I also use
Storify and Cover it Live for liveblogging which incorporate tweets
so it is important to keep tweeting and engaging with people out
there." Storify allows users to create a webpage which tells a
story based entirely on social media posts, which is one form of
curation.

Liveblogging, which involves regular short updates relating to a
given event, can be popular for a large, fast-moving occasion such
as the London riots of last August, which proved very popular in
the first days of The West Londoner,
gaining the site 1 million hits in 24 hours.

Social media can also be a good driver of traffic to your website.
"I have integrated a Twitter feed into the site which is very
simple to do," says Paul Deach. He adds: "I also add bespoke feeds
so, for example, when we had the snow, I put up a snow feed into
the @SurreyTravel Twitter account. I also incorporate our YouTube
and Soundcloud social networks into the site."

In contrast, Jon Bounds says "I have a Facebook page and a Twitter
feed but they do nothing but pump out the RSS. They're clearly
labelled as such so people don't expect interaction."

Striking a balance between the two is Anna Williams, editor of
The Ambler, who says "I
considered separating my personal and work persona [on Twitter],
but after talking to various professional journalists, I decided
against."

We’re part of
the community rather than just an employee of someone’s media
empire.Anna Williams

While Jon Bounds says "no"
to the question of whether a hyperlocal can become a viable
business, citing worries about "compromising the integrity of how
you're seen," and Anna Williams says she doesn’t think her town is
"ready" for online advertising, others are a little more optimistic
on the business front. Paul Deach points to the potential benefits
of "editorial content, videos and photo blogs," as well as
button-sized advertisements.

Above all, it is important to differentiate between any local
newspapers, whose voice may be rather formal and detached from the
community, and your hyperlocal venture. Anna Williams says, "I
think that’s one of the points about being hyperlocal; we’re part
of the community rather than just an employee of someone's media
empire."